I hope you aren't expecting startup code to be a lot better. Not only will startup code tend to be crappy, but you run into a ton of people (managers and coders alike) who will all but insist that your code be a certain level of crappy. In other words, if you write good code, then you've spent too much time on it and should have moved on to the next project.

I don't mean to give you the impression that your new job is going to suck. If you chose the right startup, you're going to have an awesome time. But I also think it's important to be realistic.

Is this such a bad thing? Engineers often have a tendency to to focus too much on writing 'good code', and forget the bigger picture of what they're working on. Technical debt is a real issue, but it's something to manage, not eliminate. I'd much rather be in a place where most engineers have at least half a pragmatic eye on products, features, and ux rather than only caring about code quality and the elegance of their algorithms. Yeah, it can also be good to have a few of those code quality sticklers around to keep everyone honest, but they shouldn't be running things or setting the tone.

I think a big part of the reason a management tier is needed at all in a lot of smaller companies is the general unwillingness of engineers to sacrifice code purity for expediency.

And I think the need for engineers in smaller companies is the unwillingness of management to sacrifice expediency for purity. :-)

Regardless, that's beside my point. It sounded like the person I responded to wanted to work on better code, so I was just pointing out that startups aren't necessarily any better in that respect. I'll leave it to him to determine how good or bad that is as I'd really rather not get involved in this old debate again.

When I went from a big company to a startup, I saw a significant increase in engineering talent. There were some good people at the big company, but there was also a lot of dead weight. It was easy to just coast through a project there. At the startup, you had to be sharp, or you were out.

I won't say the code was always pretty at the startup, but due to the higher level of skill among the developers, I think the code there was superior to what was produced at the big company.

Although the startup went under after I was there 2 years, I learned 10 times the stuff in 2 years of the startup than I did the previous 5 years at the big company. The skills I learned at the startup allowed me to get into a much better job at another big company that I stayed at for 11 years.

That's the position I'm in right now. I'm not saying there aren't startups with good code out there. I'm just trying to say that it's not startup_code == good && bigco_code == bad

At a startup the code will still be bad but there won't be anyone to blame.